People very often ask me what inspired me to write my classic masterpiece ‘Epochs of the Unreal Mind’. Indeed they do, indeed they do. Some people would say that it isn’t a masterpiece of course. They would have to say this, wouldn’t they? Other people yet again claim that I never wrote it in the first place; they claim that it’s all just fantasy on my part. We all have to put up with the critics though don’t we? Even when the critics in question exist only in our own heads…

And then there was my other great masterpiece, ‘Confessions of a Distorted Ego’. How did that work come about, people want to know? What is the back-story on that? Where did all that richly-textured and subtly-nuanced material come from? Needless to say the ‘back-story’ – if I may call it that – is intensely personal and I don’t always feel comfortable talking about it. I very rarely feel comfortable talking about it, in fact; my self-cherishing and self-aggrandising delusions are very hard to talk about. The thought of other people actually knowing what was going on in my head for all those years fills me with horror! I’m okay about it just as long as I think no one else will ever know. Otherwise, I’m not okay about it at all. That’s fairly normal I suppose. It’s only when people know about it that it gets bad and then of course it gets really, really bad. Excruciatingly bad. Unthinkably bad.

I’m only a shadow of my former self now of course. A shadow of a shadow. A husk. I guess you could say that I’m pretty much washed up. And even saying that is a euphemism. To say that I am ‘washed up’ as putting it ridiculously mildly! What a mess, huh? What a bloody mess. What a rotten bloody mess. The past has a habit of catching up with us in my experience, and I think it’s fair to say that my past has well and truly caught up with me. I don’t have the strength to outrun it any more you see. I don’t have the strength to outrun it and I don’t have the skill or ingenuity to hide from it either and that is why am sitting here like a dead duck. That is what  they say, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure that is what they say.

How does reality work anyway? Did you ever wonder that? What’s behind it? What kind of mechanism or mechanisms are responsible for driving it? Can these mechanisms go wrong? Can they be faulty, and if so, what can we do about it? Sitting here I can’t help dwelling on how bad I feel’ how tired I feel. I can’t really think about anything else. It is as if my brain just isn’t interested in thinking about anything else. I can’t move on. Possibly because is nowhere for me to move on to. I find myself wondering – for what seems like the ten millionth time today – if I might perhaps be suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. I realise perfectly well that it wouldn’t help me in the least to know whether this is happens to be the case or not. How could knowing this help me? It’s not as if there some kind of medication for it. Or maybe there is?

I frequently fantasise about paying a visit to my GP to see if he can help me with my chronic fatigue syndrome. In my fantasy he’s sitting there on the other side of the desk looking at me with a concerned and compassionate expression on his face. “I think what you need old chap is a course of high potency dexamphetamine,’ he informs me as he fills out the prescription sheet, “this should lift you out of your current unfortunate slump…” Hearing this I immediately start to feel better; hearing this, my mood starts to improve straightaway. Such are the perennial fantasies of my deranged brain, I am afraid. Such are the distorted fantasies of my hopelessly deluded egoic mind…